The present invention pertains to pharmaceutical injection devices, and, in particular, to a refill module containing medication that is used with a reusable plunger assembly.
Patients suffering from a number of different diseases frequently must inject themselves with pharmaceuticals. A variety of devices have been proposed to facilitate these injections. One type of device is an automatic injection device or autoinjector. This type of device, when triggered by a user, typically automatically inserts into the user a needle of a syringe that prior to triggering was disposed within the device housing, and then automatically injects a dose of medication through that inserted needle.
While automatic injection devices of this type may make the injection process more pleasant for some, such a device is more complex than a standard syringe. This complexity makes single use or disposable automatic injection devices more costly to manufacture than standard syringes. Automatic injection systems are known which may lessen this cost issue by utilizing a reusable plunger assembly with a disposable medication syringe. The disposable syringe serves as a replaceable refill module for the system, thereby allowing the plunger assembly to be removed from a spent syringe after the injection of the syringe's medication contents, and then reusably attached to a new, medication-filled replacement syringe for a subsequent injection with the system. While such systems are useful, users still may have various issues, depending on the system, dealing with the syringes and their associated needles. Such issues may relate to needle exposure, as well as to the task of handling, such as loading, unloading or disposing, of the syringes.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide a refill module that can overcome one or more shortcomings of the prior art.